


to ithaca

by sea_changed (foxlives)



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Complicated Emotions, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Miranda Lives AU, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 12:31:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10990989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxlives/pseuds/sea_changed
Summary: Miranda finds him first.





	to ithaca

**Author's Note:**

> written for thomas/miranda/james appreciation week on tumblr, for the prompts _what could have been (fix it)/the reunion with miranda included_. this was meant to be a short tumblr ficlet, and thus the logic is thin and the plot holes are many: it's technically a part of a larger au i have mapped out in my head, the summary of which is, _miranda really is a witch_ ; so in fact the explanation for about 80% of these gaps is quite literally "magic!!" all you really need is the knowledge that it takes place in the gap between seasons two and three, and a willingness to Go With It in the name of emotions.

Miranda finds him first.

When he's called to Mr. Oglethorpe's house it isn't a surprise; he enjoys speaking to Thomas of books and ideas, and Thomas, starved of any but the most base human contact, finds he enjoys the time they spend, despite its ironies. 

But when Oglethorpe meets him at the door, the look on his face signals that this is something else.

"There is someone here for you, Mr. Hamilton," he says, and his voice is--confused? Thomas isn't sure. 

It's Peter, he thinks immediately, and the small leap in his chest surprises him. He is so starved of any contact with his old life, his old world, that even someone who had a hand in destroying it seems welcome. He does not like to think about that, how desperate of a man he's become.

When Oglethorpe leads him into his office, however, it is not Peter who stands there, straight-spined, hands clasped in front of her.

It is not, he tells himself, it cannot be: Miranda and James died together at sea, years ago now. It cannot be his wife standing in front of him now, her hair graying and her gown plain but still exactly as beautiful as ever, her face sharp where his memory of her had gone damnably blurry, her eyes bright and almost as disbelieving as he knows his own must be.

When she sees Thomas her mouth opens in a silent sob, or a laugh, or something in between. "Miranda?" he asks, but his chest feels like the breath has been knocked from it, and his voice comes out barely a whisper. She steps toward him and he steps toward her and then their arms are around each other, and his face is pressed to the top of her head, and he is crying, he realizes, tears running into her hair.

She says his name, over and over, a comfort; and it is, he thinks, to hear his name in her voice, reminding him of who he is after so long, so long when he couldn't truly be sure anymore. 

And he had forgotten it, he realizes, a sob welling up in his chest. He had forgotten what her voice sounded like. 

He squeezes his eyes shut, and presses his face to her hair, and vows never to be apart from her long enough to forget anything of her, ever again.

They stand like that for what feels like hours, but he knows it must not be. When they finally pull back, Miranda looks up at him with a smile, though her own tears, and reaches up to thumb away the tears on his cheek. Then she turns to Mr. Oglethorpe, the lines of her face suddenly hard, and asks him coolly, "Do we have a deal?"

Thomas cranes his neck to look at Oglethorpe, who he'd forgotten was still in the room. He looks surprised, but he nods slightly. "We have a deal," he says. "Mr. Hamilton, gather your things. It seems you are leaving us today."

*

Mr. Oglethorpe suggests she wait inside the house for Thomas, but she will not, not now, be separated from him for even a moment. They walk outside, arm in arm; he leans into her, like he's guaranteeing that she's there, solid and real. She understands perfectly.

Once they are outside Thomas looks like he is struggling with something, like he is trying to ask something he's not sure he wants to know the answer to. Miranda knows the question before he asks it, and so once they are out the door she tells him quietly, "James is alive as well."

The look on his face hurts to see, so raw in its happiness that she has to look away. "He's--" Thomas says, and stops, like he can't say more.

"I--" she says, and then she stops, too, wondering how much she should say. Wondering how much she is willing to admit: _take care of james_ , he had told her, the last thing she thought he would ever say to her, her face between his hands and his father's men watching them from the doorway of the study. She remembers it with a clarity she sometimes wished she could forget, pain making every moment crisp and clear. 

She had failed him, but they have never been anything but honest with each other, and this is not the time to break that. "I don't know where he is," she tells him. "But I've written to people who will send him to us." Her letter to Eleanor Guthrie had been returned by a woman named Max: she does not understand Nassau, kept herself from truly understanding it over these last long years, but the woman Max had given her promise, next time Captain Flint was in the harbor, to send him to Savannah. 

"You don't know where he is?" Thomas repeats, a small frown between his eyes.

She wonders how much to say. Seeing James will be a shock, she knows, without preparation, but she can't tell him everything. Knows that James would not want her to tell him anything. "Did you hear of the Charles Town fire?" she asks finally, carefully.

"Yes," he says, and his frown only deepens.

"He believes me dead in it," she tells him. Not saying the other parts of it, the parts she nonetheless knows to be true: _he set it_ , and, perhaps most damning of all, _he set it for me_. "I do not know where he went after that."

Thomas swallows, and looks away over the wavering green of the sugarcane, stretching out as far as can be seen. "You settled in Charles Town?" he asks, as if trying to grasp something of the story he can hold.

"No," she says, surprised, illogically, that he doesn't know already, somehow. "We went to New Providence."

He looks back at her. "New Providence?" 

She nods. "Of course."

A slight, wan smile comes to his face. "Of course," he repeats, almost to himself. "But I've heard stories--they say it's even more wild than it was, run by pirates and thieves."

She realizes, sudden and sinking, that she has no idea how to have this conversation. Certainly not without James. She takes his arm again, squeezing slightly. "We should get your things," she tells him, keeping her voice level, "and get you out of here."

He looks at her, long and hard. There is still confusion in his eyes, but even now, she realizes, with relief that chokes her, they understand each other. He nods slightly, and slowly, as if they are much older than they truly are, they make their way to his quarters.

*

Savannah's harbor grows closer, appearing around a bend in the river. The anger in James's chest, already impossibly sharp, impossibly hot, only grows more so: scorching out his lungs, his heart. When Max had called him to what is now her office, had given him the letter in Miranda's beautiful, achingly familiar handwriting, with the date weeks past the day he had watched Peter's man put a bullet in her head, felt her blood on his face--he had had a moment, just a moment, of warm, white hope. For just a moment he had wondered if it could be true. 

The immediate, brutal crushing of that hope hurt nearly as much as her loss had, and so now, standing at the bow of the piragua he had commandeered to get him here, he has carved out the last shreds of hope from his chest, and replaced it with scorching anger.

That someone would go this far, to mimic Miranda's handwriting to draw him to Savannah, of all places, with the lure, equally painful, of Thomas's presence--James will admit he doesn't understand it. To do something like this, he thinks, someone would have to hate him, truly wish to destroy him, and know him well enough to know exactly how to do so. James thought he had killed the only man capable of it, his sword sinking deep into Peter's chest as Charles Town burned around them. He doesn't understand who would do this to him, but he knows he will not, cannot rest until they are not here to do it to him any longer.

He sails past the town, and grounds the piragua on the banks of the river, next to the steep bluff that rises up from the river's edge. He jumps over the side into knee-deep water, boots sinking into the soft riverbed; Billy watches him warily, backed by the absolute minimum number of men he'd had to bring with to sail the piragua, every set of eyes watches him like he is a man gone mad. 

He had left Silver in charge of the Walrus docked in Nassau harbor--a stupid move, but James hadn't been able to think of a better one. Now he regrets it for more than the havoc he imagines Silver to be wreaking; Silver would have said something to him, anything, and it might've made James want to strangle him but it would've been somehow comforting. The journey had been unnaturally quiet, and when the men had spoken, it had not been to him.

James tells Billy, "Stay here. Be ready to leave quickly"; Billy nods shortly, but doesn't lose his wary look. James doesn't intend to stay long. Whoever this is will seek James out, he is sure, if they wish to hurt him so. After that it will be quick work to kill them, and lay to rest the ghosts that swirl inside his mind. 

It is only a mile or so along the river to double back to the harbor, but the ledge of land between the river and the bluff is narrow at best, nonexistent at times, and James wades at times through water that rises above his boots. He is sure someone saw him sail past, but at least this way he did not sail straight into their hands. This way he is prepared, and watchful. 

But when he gets close enough to the harbor to see up the steep stairs that lead from the riverbank to the town proper, to check for anyone waiting for him, all he is sees is--all he sees is her. 

He stops, closes his eyes. Opens them again. It has to be her: he would know her anywhere, from the slightest glimpse, from the way she sits and the angle at which she holds her head. Something cold goes through the burning anger in his chest.

There is something different about her, not like usual. Usually she is water-drenched, speaking formless words to him, or screaming at him, or just looking at him, accusing. But always looking at him, always, except when he sees her dead on the floor, and even then her sightless eyes seem to see straight through him. Now, she is sitting on one of the barrels piled at the edge of the bluff, her gown not the pale one she died in, her head covered. She is looking to something, someone, next to her, hidden by James's angle and the piles of barrels and crates.

He only ever sees her like this in true dreams now, each one precious and devastating to wake from. He will see her in their house on New Providence, sitting before the fire, reading. She will not notice him, but he doesn't mind. In the dream he merely stands, and watches her, knowing that she is there, that if he called to her she would look up at him. She would smile, perhaps, and say his name. That is enough.

But he's almost certain he isn't dreaming now. Perhaps Billy is right, perhaps his last shreds of sanity have left him--it would be only right, he thinks. The Miranda was his last hold on the real world he would believe: that her death would drive him mad seems only fitting.

He places his foot on the bottom stair, stepping toward her.

*

Thomas sees him, walking along the narrow riverbank, and something in his chest catches. Miranda stands abruptly, as he comes into view, and Thomas wonders for a wild, scared moment if he would have truly known it was him, without her implicit reassurance. Even from too far away to see much, Thomas can see first that he is different: his clothes dark and worn, so unlike the uniform Thomas remembers him in; the set of his shoulders rounded and weary. But it is him, it is him, and that is more than Thomas could ever have imagined he'd have again.

When he is closer Thomas watches him look up, to the railing they stand at: he stops, freezes, as if he has seen ghosts. Perhaps a ghost: _he thinks me dead_ , he remembers Miranda telling him. Thomas keeps himself away, in the shadows of the tall-stacked hogsheads of goods, for reasons he cannot quite explain, even to himself. 

After a moment, however, he puts his head down again, begins climbing the stairs up the bluff. He gets closer, and closer, and then he is there, and Thomas can barely breathe.

"James," Miranda says to him, taking a step forward.

James stops, but he doesn't turn to face her. "You're not real," he says quietly, voice hoarse but firm.

The line of Miranda's mouth breaks. "James--" she says, and steps forward, reaching out to him, touching his arm.

James looks down at where her fingers hold tight to the thick, salt-crusted fabric of his coat. Slowly, as if in a dream, he reaches, rests his hand on top of hers. He closes his eyes. "Miranda?" he asks.

"Yes," she says. Thomas cannot see her face now, but it sounds as if she has begun to cry. 

"How?" James asks, and it sounds as if his voice is being dragged out from deep within him. He reaches up, brushes his thumb gently, almost hesitantly, over her forehead.

She doesn't say anything, but he looks at her and something in her face must give him an answer. " _James--_ " she says, and then they are embracing, clutching tight at one another.

James has his face buried in her shoulder, eyes shut tight; after a minute, however, he opens them, and looks up. And sees Thomas.

Miranda lets him go then, and he seems to stagger slightly from the loss. His mouth forms what Thomas recognizes, even if James cannot seem to find his voice, as his name. "Yes," Miranda says to him softly. "Yes."

Thomas steps toward him, and he says, "James," and something in James's face seems to break; he all but falls into Thomas. Thomas wraps his arms around him, and all but laughs in pure, wild happiness; the kind of happiness he would've said he had forgotten how to feel. Miranda had told him James was alive and that had seemed like it was everything, but truly having him here in his arms, warm and solid and _him_ , is something else entirely.

 _james, james_ , he whispers against his neck, into his hair. James holds him tight, shakes against him. Thomas presses his mouth to his jaw, to his temple; he threads his fingers through his hair, shorter now, barely chin-length. He presses their foreheads together and he doesn't know which of them decides to lean in, to press their mouths together behind the cover of the stacks of barrels and crates, but once they start Thomas doesn't know how he could ever stop. 

James has his hands in Thomas's shirt, pulling him closer even when it is an impossibility; Thomas cradles his face in his hands, and thinks, he is delivered. 

*

They tell him everything, and he doesn't speak to either of them for four days.

They have found a house on the edge of town, emptied after its occupant had gone farther north up the coast. It faces to the forest that still surrounds the town, so neatly cut from the wilderness, in the farthest corner from the water. James has said he doesn't mind, but Miranda has found him some days at the edge of the bluff, leaning against the splintering rail, looking out over the river, toward the sea. 

He had gone back to the river, that first day, sent away the part of his crew that he had sailed here with. He told Miranda, quietly, when Thomas has fallen asleep that night, that he had told them to elect a new captain. She is not sure she believes him, but wonders if it is only a small hurt part of her heart that protests: she had told herself for so many years that this is who James had become, that he would give up for nothing. Now Thomas has returned, and he has shed it like he would an old coat, without, it would seem, a second thought. 

Thomas had wanted to stay close to the plantation, and so they had, gone not to Boston or Philadelphia. He says that he thinks he can release the rest of the prisoners, given time, that he can draw up a plan for their introduction into Georgia society, such as it is, and present it to Mr. Oglethorpe. He explains this to them calmly, thoroughly, as it it has been something he's thought about until the plan was smooth and polished as a stone, and Miranda realizes with a deep, unexplainable ache just how thoroughly he has managed to survive these years, not just in body but in mind: still, and so wholly, himself.

That should make it harder, she thinks, to tell him. It would be nice, she thinks, to be able to say, _you remained yourself but we did not_. In truth, she thinks, she is not sure that's what happened.

They tell him everything sitting at the wooden table they now have before their hearth, and Thomas is absolutely silent through it all. It is James who ends the story, telling of killing Peter in the fire, and Miranda hadn't known that: she feels a bolt of satisfaction, before looking at Thomas's face, how sad he looks over the storm of anger clearly brewing in him. 

Miranda says, "And then I found you," and Thomas nods, acknowledging the end of their story. And then he stands up, and he leaves.

James is half out of his chair to follow him before Miranda catches his sleeve in her hand. He looks back to her, eyes wild with panic, but she says, "He will come back."

James looks at her as if she's lost her mind. "You can't know that."

"He will come back," she repeats, voice harder. "If only to yell himself hoarse at us. The Thomas I know," she tells him, voice growing ever so slightly wry, "would never turn down a good shouting match."

He rips her sleeve from her grasp, stalks across the tiny room before wheeling back to face her. "This is not a _fucking_ joke."

"Of course it isn't," she says scathingly. She stands to face him, hands on the table before her. "But we could not build a life with him again based on lies, and even if we deluded ourselves into thinking we could he is too smart for that to ever have worked." She takes a breath, gathering herself. "We did the only thing we could, and now we must work with what is left. We, out of anyone, should know how to do that by now."

James stares at her for a moment, and then something in him seems to collapse, and he walks to the bed, sits slope-shouldered on the end of it. He puts his face in his hands, but she hears it when he says, voice broken: "I cannot lose him again."

She feels something in her chest soften. She looks down at the table, the swirling grain of the wood. "I know," she says softly, and oh _God_ , she does. "You know that I know."

He looks up at her, and his eyes are terrified. She walks over to the bed, and sits next to him, and they stay like that for a long time.

*

The front steps of the house are made of badly jointed wood, warped from the heat. The creak when James sits on them, and James sits on them now almost constantly: when Thomas is in the house the tension is too much to bear, and when he leaves James can never quite believe Miranda when she says he's coming back. And so he sits, not inside and not out, not forgiven but not entirely scorned: he does not know what to do but sit here, and wait--for Thomas, for judgement, for someone, for anyone to tell him how to go on from here.

It is a week before, when the door opens behind him, it is not Thomas leaving, or Miranda tiredly telling him to come inside, but Thomas in only his shirtsleeves. He sits beside James, not close enough to touch, but close enough to reach to, if he wanted. 

"You don't have to leave every time I'm home, you know," Thomas says, after several long moments.

James clears his throat, looks down at his hands. He doesn't respond, not sure how to. Not sure how to ask about the way Thomas had said _home_.

Thomas sighs, slightly. "I have been--angry, with you," he says carefully. "I still am. But that doesn't mean I want you out of my sight."

James takes a shaking breath. "Tell me what I can do to make this right," he says to Thomas, comes close to pleading with him. "Tell me how I can fix this."

The corners of Thomas's mouth tighten, but that is the only indication, for several impossibly long moments, that he had heard James at all. He stares out at the empty square, eyes far away.

"I don't understand," he says finally, carefully, anger still taut underneath every word. "I don't understand how you thought this, any of this, was what I would want."

James swallows, his whole chest aching. "You were gone," he says, he tries to explain. He owes Thomas this, at least, this and so much more, and so he tries. "I couldn't do what you wanted, the way that you had wanted, but I thought I could do it another way and I. I couldn't let everything you had wanted for this world become locked away with you."

The line of Thomas's mouth thins. "I wanted to reform the pirates. You became one."

"Yes," James says. 

"I don't understand," Thomas says again, voice hard.

James swallows, grasps for the words. "It was clear, when we got to the island," he says slowly, "there was no law there. And besides, I was no longer a part of that world, I had been--removed, from it. This was the only way to do--anything. It was necessary."

Thomas seems to consider that, if not accept it. "And my father?" he asks. "Peter? The whole of Charles Town? Were they _necessary_?"

James tries to breath through the way it feels as if he's been hit in the chest, struggling to breath. "You were _dead_ ," he manages finally, but his voice wavers. "And then Miranda was dead, and I couldn't--" He takes a breath. "I didn't know what to do, except take from the world what it had taken from me."

Thomas is silent. "Did it work?" he asks, finally. "Punishing the world for what it had done to you?" Like he is curious, like he is really asking.

James shakes his head a little. "No," he admits.

Thomas is silent for a long time after that. James sits beside him, just as quiet: he will continue to sit beside him, he thinks with staid certainty in his chest, to apologize or explain himself or whatever he needs to do, until Thomas forgives him. Even if he never forgives himself, it will be enough to sit here beside him, knowing that is here, and whole, and if he hates James for the rest of both their lives then at least that means he is alive to hate him, and after the last ten years, James thinks, that is enough. That is more than enough.

"I don't hate you," Thomas says finally, quietly, as if he could read James's mind. "I don't think I could. But I am--" He stops, takes a breath. "I am not sure how to do this."

"I understand," James says, voice rasping over the words. 

Thomas looks at him, finally, the first time it feels like he's looked at him since he and Miranda told him their story. "That doesn't mean I don't want to try," he says, not soft, but entirely earnest in that way he has, that still pulls at something in James's chest, after all this time. 

James cannot say anything to that, only nod. Thomas takes his hand, and squeezes it, and doesn't let go.

*

The sun here is bright, the heat warm and pressing. Thomas doesn't mind it, can't resent it: he doesn't know how long he had spent in Bethlem--Peter said four years, when he got him out, but Thomas doesn't trust much of what Peter had said to him over the years--but the memory of it still lives inside him. In his lungs, with a cough even the Georgia sun hasn't been able to burn away; in his bones, stiff and aching whenever a storm comes through. What he remembers from it is the cold and the damp, overwhelmingly so. The misery, like a reflection of it, that clawed its way under his skin, into his heart. 

Now, he can go outside when he is cold, or get a blanket. Or both, sitting behind their house with the quilt from their bed caped over his shoulders, until he is warm, until he can drive out the misery his body remembers.

The memories are not so bad today, and the sun overhead is heavy and warm. Thomas walks outside in only his coat, to the back of the house, where Miranda has begun turning over the red earth to make a garden. It surprises him, to see her crouched over the dirt, so unlike the Miranda he had clung to in his memories of her. He supposed none of them are the people the others remember them to be. 

He sits on the brittle wooden backdoor steps. She looks up, and sees him. She stands, brushing her hands off her apron, and walks over to him, sits down beside him.

After a few moments, he says, "You garden, now."

She smiles, ever so slightly. "It was something to do," she says. "James was gone so often, and we had some things--he would bring back books. He bought a spinet for me, a few years in," and she has a slight, faraway smile on her lips. "But the days dragged on, and I wanted to do something, to control the land I felt exiled on."

She has begun to do this, to hand him pieces of the years he had missed, like the smooth-edged fragments of glass that wash up on the shore here. Things that had happened, ways that she had felt. He appreciates it, more than he can say.

"It sounds--lonely," he says. "I suppose I thought, before they told me you were both dead, that you were happy together, somewhere. It was a comfort."

Her smile turns sadder. "I'm afraid we failed you, then," she tells him. "We--were not very kind to each other, much of the time."

"But you stayed," he says. "You stayed together."

"I don't think we could not have," she tells him. "We were all we had left. Something like that--it does not breed kindness, though I suppose it does bring something with it. Knowledge, perhaps, if nothing else."

Thomas wonders if he should say what he is about to, but after all they have never been anything but honest with each other, the best that they know how. "I sometimes look at the two of you and wonder where I fit, anymore," he admits. 

"Thomas--" Miranda says, and her voice sounds suddenly unsteady, as if through tears. "You don't understand at all, do you?" she asks. "You were what was holding us together. You are--" She stops, takes a shaking breath. "I understand," she says slowly, "if you do not want to forgive us, and I would not want your forgiveness if you feel you must give it. But please know that you have always had a place with us, even when we thought you dead. You have always been a part of us."

Thomas closes his eyes, lets that hit him. The enormity of it. The confidence in Miranda's voice, that the three of them, after all, are so inextricably connected to each other, that even presumed death could not tear them away from each other. 

"I am going to forgive you," he says, carefully, finally, "and I am going to forgive James. Not because I feel as if I must, but because I don't want to carry about this bitterness, I don't want to look inside myself and see it there." He pauses, looking out at their small piece of land, the town beyond. "I wonder if that isn't terribly selfish."

She looks over at him, an impossibly soft, impossibly fond, impossibly sad look on her face.

"What is it?" he asks her.

"Only you," she says, shaking her head a little, "would worry your forgiveness is _selfish_."

He looks at her a long moment, but then he feels the corner of his mouth twitch. She starts to smile at him, and if neither of their expressions lose their sadness, the magnitude of what has happened to them over the last ten years, it is still something. 

*

"I dreamt of you," he tells her.

They are sitting at the table, her paring the eyes from potatoes and the tops off carrots, James cutting them into even, methodical pieces. Both were bought from the market, the vegetables growing in their own garden too small yet to do anything with, but soon, Miranda thinks, they will be. When Thomas had left this morning to meet with Mr. Oglethorpe, he had kissed them both as he had left, easy, and the stunned, hopeful look on James's face as he watched him leave had been mirrored on her own, she knew.

The two of them sitting like this reminds her, forcefully and with an ache in her throat, of the first few months on New Providence, the few small soft moments they had been able to carve from the grief and guilt and misery. James showing her how to cut vegetables for soup, her own pieces inefficient and uneven: she knew the recipe, knew how to direct a kitchen-full of servants to make it, but had never considered that there was a method to preparing the ingredients that she was unaware of. James had looked at the vegetables, and looked at her, and they had smiled at each other; the smallest, thinnest of smiles, but smiles nonetheless, and it had been such a relief to know that she could do something like smile again.

Now, James looks down at his hands, the knife in one. "When I thought you were dead," he goes on, "I would--see you. When I was asleep, but sometimes--" He stops, as if reconsidering what he is saying. But still, he says: "I would see you. I thought I was going insane." A small, wan smile has crept over his face. "You were haunting me."

She sets down her own knife. "I thought I was dead still, when I woke up," she says. "The fire was everywhere, my skirts were burning around me. I thought I was a ghost."

He takes an unsteady breath. "I should've gone back for you."

She scoffs a little, low in her throat. "Of course you shouldn't have," she tells him. "All that would've done is kill you, too." 

He doesn't say anything to that. But his eyes close, and when he speaks, his voice is wrecked, barely there. "I missed you."

Something catches in her chest like a sob. "I missed you, too," she tells him.

She reaches across the table, puts her hand over his. He takes it in his, presses his mouth to her knuckles.

*

James wakes up, two months in. Light is streaming inside the house, and so one of them must be awake, he thinks, to open the shutters. His thoughts are slow with sleep, but once he wakes he wakes quickly.

He opens his eyes. Miranda is across the bed from him, a space between them that Thomas had fallen asleep in. He and Miranda are still sometimes skittish in bed with each other, too many memories of the hollow, guilty way they had fucked each other too often, not sure, anymore, if they can fuck the way they used to, without Thomas's ghost and their own demons clawing at them.

With Thomas between them, though, it is as easy as it used to be. More complicated, but still _easy_ \--a contradiction in terms James would be hard-pressed to explain. He knows, though, that Thomas's hands on him had untied some knot in his chest he'd barely known was there, the ache of it so constant. He breathed easier, Thomas's mouth on his.

He turns over, faces the room. Thomas is sitting before the hearth, coaxing last night's embers into a cooking fire. A catch in James's throat eases: still he is scared of Thomas's disappearance, the day he will wake up and Thomas will be gone again. 

Years ago, back in London, it was always James who woke first, his mind trained to a different schedule: he would lay between them, for hours, sometimes, warm and perfectly content in a way he could never before remember being. Now, though, Thomas is often the first to wake: James has caught him sometimes in the middle of the night, gripped by nightmares that make him go rigid and still, but Thomas shows no sign of wanting to speak of them yet. And so James won't; he is perfectly content to wait, the time they have now spiraling out before him in a way that seems not to be believed. 

Thomas must feel James's gaze on him, because he turns, looks at him. Smiles, small and warm, and James smiles back, just the same.

Beside him, Miranda stirs. She moves into the patch of sunlight the falls over the bed, bare shoulder lit golden: when she opens her eyes she looks to James, and then beyond him to Thomas, and when her eyes flutter closed again she looks content. Thomas looks over, smiles a little at her.

James looks between them, and he thinks, finally: he has returned home.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr at [sea-changed](https://sea-changed.tumblr.com/).


End file.
